Event Finder

Inspiration 🌱

We were inspired by the sudden curiosities we get -- what notable events have happened on this particular day in the past? Or what has happened in the past just in this specific month? Plagued by the lack of time to research and an itch to learn more, we set out to make something that would answer that for us when our burning curiosity gets the best of us. Now, there's a beautiful website that does the research for you!

What it does 🔍

Event Finder allows you to search through the vast collection of events listed in Wikipedia by just inputting a date! Or a month, or year, or year and month. You also have the option to filter the results based on matching words, like "Gettysburg", in case you're looking for something more relevant!

How we built it 🛠️

This website is built using Glitch, Node, Express, and simple CSS styling. Although Glitch has failed us a couple of times during this project, it's an invaluable resource as it lets our team collaborate on a website together simultaneously. So... we stuck with it.

Jinkang: I also used VS Code in conjunction with Live Server to build the front-end visuals as those tools allow for faster edits! After I'm satisfied with the results, I copied what I worked on locally over to Glitch, so my teammates can work on it.

Challenges we ran into 🧱

The starter template provided by Glitch didn't fit how we wanted to build the project, and when we decided to switch it (from using Fastify to Express), it got a bit messy. Luckily, Octavio, our backend developer, cleared that up for us.

Later, when we tried to use the fetch API, we neglected the fact that we were using Node! Thus resulting in an hour of scrambling to fix this core mechanic of our website. After some trial and error, Jinkang, our frontend developer, suggested Axios as an alternative, which worked to replace our original use of fetch!

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🏅

We're proud that we made this succinct website in such a short amount of time!

What we learned 🧠

Our brain cell connections expanded by the numbers!

Jinkang: As one of the front-end developers, I learned a lot about the use of color and contrast during the design process, and how to make the look of each element consistent with each other.

Octavio: As the backend developer, I learned about making API requests, handling the data, and creating a web app with express.js

Richard: Although I primarily worked on the front-end user experience, I learned about how content can be dynamically created on the front-end by using data from outside sources.